I’ve never had one ripe this early. Very juicy, run down your chin, eating experience.
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Please keep up all your fruit art, It always brightens the day and it helps me encourage my wife on why the greenhouse addition is in the need and not want category!!
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There are lots of greenhouses in the Denver area. It would be a great place to grow fruit in a greenhouse. My daughter lives in Arvada. So every time I visit I’m checking them out.
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Yep we get some crazy good sun, the only hard part is keeping your evaporative cooler running while you still need it in the late fall or spring during the day, even though you will likely have freezes at night. Easily fixed by more ventilation though and with our weather not a place to put anything shoddy up and hard to get away with cheaping out on ventilation. Your greenhouse is very impressive.
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I haven’t found that to be an issue. I run the evaporative cooler all winter in order to get chilling. Plenty of nights below freezing. No issues with anything freezing up. In Denver you could get plenty of chilling just by using heavy shading by day. You won’t need the evap cooler during the three coldest months when you are getting chilling. At least that would be my thinking at this point.
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Oh more its that we can get to 100 in january on a sunny day with just the automatic vents and in the spring you need the evaporative cooler during the day it can get so hot, what a friend of mine does is uses a cheap hose and a good freezeless faucet so that the hose breaks and the faucet does not if hes gone or forgets to unhook it on a random hard freeze. We can get stupid zero degree hits in late october that will zap your sprinklers so thats the main worry. It gets the chilling just fine all night here though and usually people do huge water tanks and or NG/propane heaters if they are trying to keep it year round, you really need one that is wired though for real fans at least if you want them to run most of the year. My aunt had one with just the louvered vents and hers got to 120 in the winter one year with her min/max thermometer hygrometer, there were very few months she could use it more for early spring and finishing stuff in fall. She finally got it wired and evap cooled last year and ran it until december successfully with no heat. Now she is thinking of heating it for next year since she just got a bunch of citrus trees i assume she is going to have to.
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I ran mine all of Dec Jan and Feb without evaporative cooling and it never got over 95. It sounds like you don’t have big enough exhaust fans. Just one 36 inch fan with 1/4 hp motor will usually keep mine below 90 on days when it’s sunny and 75 outside. Mine at 1725 sqft has three such exhaust fans but I almost never run all three even in June when it’s 100F outside.
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Do you run the evap cooler the other 9 months or are you too humid for that? Hers is a 20 x 30 with a 1/2 hp squirrel cage evap cooler and a equivalent cfm i think 24" but maybe 36" louvered exhaust at the end. That handled a rather mild summer this last year very well and she was able to bring everything else inside her house last year and did not want to pay to heat it but there will be no way this year. If she wants fruit off the citrus she will need to keep it in the 35-40 degree range right? I showed her pictures of your greenhouse and she is bringing a potted nectarine and peach that wont make it here inside it and probably a few plums knowing her as well as 6 figs and 8 to 9 citrus trees.
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I run the evap cooler everyday all summer. Our dew points usually run 0-40F in winter and spring, 40-60F in summer. It’s not humid in the gh even in summer. Dew points in Denver should be in the same range sometimes even lower. WE get 15 inches rain per yr, you are around 18 but cooler. Winter here is 60/30F and summer low 90s/low60s.
It sounds like her evap cooler pushes cool air in. Mine has exhaust fans that pull the hottest air out while pulling air thru the cooler pads. My style is more efficient but hers can work if big enough.
I grew citrus with nights of 35-40F. Warmer would be better but in Denver heating gets very expensive. That’s also ideal chilling range at night.
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Thank you by the way! Yeah sadly my aunt built hers at the very edge of her property some 15 years ago because she used to have a beautiful ash that stayed alive until 3 years ago shading most of her yard. Eventually the EAB got it and it was one of the few left in denver. She has been only organic gardening there for 40 years but hired a chemical company to use all the pesticides against them but the tree died the next year sadly and was a fortune to remove but she had a little left over and got her greenhouse wired up. I will check if she has negative pressure, Do you think another exhaust fan would be the best option if it gets hotter this year? she has those automatic window vents also from before. She is very excited for her citrus trees!
My goal for mine is pouring a cement pad (But leaving 3/4" pipe for cold water and a 1/2" hot line and might as well bring a gas line cap there) attaching to the south side of my house a 16’ x 40’ gothic arch half greenhouse and somehow calling this a porch add on for permits ? Then if i build it have enough to have removeable walls and whatever fans i would need to not overheat my house in the summer, my house evaporative cooler is overrated and could bring a lot of cool air in the summer (I have to let the moisture out anyways). I was thinking of doing glass because of safety but some of the polycarbonates seem pretty hard to break into also, what would you do now for a permanent fixture attached to your house (We get pretty vicious hail also and have high wind).
You need one air exchange per minute to hold inside within 15F of outside. So for a 20x30x10, 6000 cfm. Actually 20x30 is 1/3 of mine. So one 36 inch exhaust fan with 1/4 hp motor would do nicely. They want 1/2 to 3/4 hp but run it slower for more efficiency lower cost. For proper use you need the wet wall opposite the exhaust fan and pull the air in thru the wet wall. That exhausts the hottest air and pulls in the coldest with no mixing. In June when it hits 100F here dew points are low or it won’t get that hot. I can hold the gh to 90F inside. In August with 60F dew point low 90s inside rarely 95.
I’d use double wall polycarbonate but don’t have security issues. A house attached is way different than stand alone. The moisture issues are beyond my experience.
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That is very impressive, my biggest worry is adding heat load to my house during the summer, we really never get humidity unless the sun is gone, but I always get a little bit of awe when i go in greenhouses when the sun is full bore and appreciate the “greenhouse effect” and how thick the air is.
I am concerned about trapping humidity up next to my house and was thinking of installing a roofing vent along the house wall and reinforce it enough so that if there was a fire someone could escape the window it will be right under (im good with a nice forced slide off). Its exterior finished for weather but we do not have much humidity and i dislike the idea of introducing too much of it like i would for a regular greenhouse and do not want to introduce any “black mold” as that hits peoples houses pretty bad here. I put a lot of vents in my attic and was happy to have no issues.
My goal was to keep the sunroom/gh around 40% humidity and not let any moisture build up on my outside wall, my thoughts was this would reduce my windloss and heatload in my house? If you think this is a bad idea i would love to hear however. Do you put thrip screening up before your wet wall or does the wet wall on its own block bugs (also mosquitos and flies?).
The air is only “thick” in a greenhouse when it isn’t being ventilated. When it’s cold outside and you want the gh warm that’s what happens. It doesn’t happen in summer. I have an exhaust fan running 24/7 from April thru Oct.
My biggest concern would be humidity building up in the gh when you are heating. That’s when it gets humid and wet.
There are few few flies at times in the gh but never many and no mosquitoes. No thrip screen and less thrips than outside. The insect issues have been spider mites, a few beetles, and some kind of black vine weevil.
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